People seeking spiritual meaning are more likely to turn to Buddhism than their local parish, writes BREDA O'BRIEN
THIS DAY 30 years ago, the country was still bathed in the euphoria of the papal visit. Pope John Paul had flown to Boston just two days before using Aer Lingus, the first airline other than Alitalia to have the privilege of transporting a pope.
It is often forgotten that the papal visit was an extraordinary feat for a small, relatively impoverished country to carry off. The visit was announced at two months’ notice, and there were no real precedents to draw on. Certainly, the pope’s visit to Poland had attracted massive crowds. However, as Msgr Thomas Fehily, executive director of the papal visit wrote later in The Word magazine, the communist government, still smarting about the way the pope had out-manoeuvred it at every turn, was not in the mood to share how it had managed it all.
While pundits predicted people would stay at home and watch it all on television, the organising committee gambled that at least a million would turn out in Phoenix Park. They underestimated by nearly quarter of a million, but it was still orderly, safe and good-humoured.
The logistics were daunting. Among other things, the architect Ronnie Tallon had to provide water and sanitation for over a million people. On the day, 13,000 voluntary stewards helped to make it a model of health and safety practice long before the cliché entered the language, so much so that there were even two centres fully equipped for surgical operations in the park – one right behind the altar.
Companies fell over themselves to offer help, giving people paid leave to help with public relations and secretarial work. The steelworks that was approached to make the papal cross initially refused on the ground that it was an impossible task to complete the cross in four weeks. The workers took umbrage at the management’s stance, and literally worked night and day to complete it.
Looking back, it truly was a different country. Without wishing to denigrate the event, the only other occasion I recall such an outpouring of national fervour was Italia ’90. It seems extraordinary today that it was Catholicism that provoked such a display of national pride. It seems even more incomprehensible to young people.
At this remove, the popular verdict was that it was the last hurrah of traditional Catholicism. However, Ireland in 1979 was not some kind of oasis of devotion in a secular landscape. Traditional faith had been in decline since the 1960s, and being religious was in fact more uncool in the 1970s and 1980s than it is today, when young people are more likely to shrug and say to peers, “Whatever you are into”, rather than mock them for having faith.
As for the alleged heyday of the Catholic Church, does anyone miss the church of the 1950s, or indeed the 1950s at all? There was a great sense of solidarity and identity, but it came at the expense of a stifling conformity, and an inability to confront the darkness that was in our society.
Sure, the pews are no longer full every Sunday, although they are still fuller than almost anywhere in Europe, but by and large, those who attend are there because they want to be. Could that have been said in the 1950s?
However, I am far from sanguine about the future of Irish Catholicism. It is not young people themselves who make me pessimistic, because they are sharp, articulate and capable of being extraordinarily generous. But they live in an insulated bubble, a world of technological communication in the here and now, which has generated a kind of cultural amnesia.
It is hard for adults in their 40s and 50s to grasp that young people today have never experienced an oppressive church. In fact, many of them have little experience of church, positive or negative, other than sporadic attendance.
Rather shockingly for the lefties who wanted rid of the church so that socialism could thrive, the decline in church influence matched a drift towards the right and away from social justice. Among many of the young, no great passion for a better world filled the void left by the removal of the church as an influence, but rather a restless seeking after meaning.
Sadly, one lesson that our young people did absorb from older generations was how to drink gargantuan amounts. It is important to realise that a minority still manage to drink moderately, but it is not uncommon for 16- or 17-year-olds from well-functioning, comfortable families to admit to having blackouts. The search for meaning for young people often ends at the bottom of a glass.
The institutional church today is a chastened church, and rightly so. Two decades of scandals revealed that institutional preservation was more important than children – an appalling indictment of a church that claims to follow Christ. It is sad, however, that those who never abused, and who worked hard and idealistically, are often tarred with the same brush.
It is sadder still that all that is positive about Catholicism is also leaking away. At its best it is a religion that feeds the soul through the senses and the imagination. Yet how many Catholic parishes could honestly say they are offering nourishment for the spirit and heart?
It is not just because of the scandals that people seeking for spiritual meaning are more likely to turn to Buddhism than their local Catholic parish. Nothing wrong with Buddhism, and we could learn a lot from it. But there are two millennia of spiritual teachings in Christianity, including sustaining methods of prayer and meditation.
Ultimately, for the wider population not directly affected by abuse, the greatest failure of the Catholic Church in Ireland may be its failure to respond to the need in human beings for a practical, lived spirituality that encourages service and gives profound meaning to the most mundane of acts.